The film that you are about to see is based on a story told a hundred years ago by America’s greatest writer of drama and suspense…

So begins the 1953 animated adaptation of Poe’s sinister masterpiece, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In case its medium suggested at all that this might be one for the kiddies, the British Board of Film Censors was quick to brand this short film as the first X-rated cartoon in Britain’s cinematic history. Watch it in all its antiquated eeriness above. Just try not to hear your heart thump when you hear James Mason read the line

“But why will you say that I am mad?”